Online users

As expected, Yahoo! have made their blogs move this week, just not in the way we'd imagined. No, no dedicated blog search, not yet at least. What they've done, is rolled blog results into Yahoo! News. They appear as a sidebar to the right, which rather unfortunately makes them look like Search ads. See the results for a Y!News search for WordPress. At the time of writing, you can see Threadwatch as the top result.

From the Y!Blog:

Today we've begun the integration of blogs in Yahoo! News Search. Now when you search on Yahoo! News you will see blog results as well as content from thousands of trusted news sites. The experiences and opinions published on blogs make a great addition to the mainstream news people read everyday. And major world events are further fueling the growth of blogs as platforms for anyone who wants to have a public voice. At times, even everyday bloggers beat the mainstream media to a story.

Despite my slight dissapointment at no dedicated blog search, i do think that rolling them into the news is a damn good idea, but man, not the greatest spot for them i think eh?

Let's hope that comes out of beta soon, and we see the full on blog search, which i understand will come...

I think it makes the News search more useful, because a lot of people use blogs as an enhancement once they have read the mainstream articles on a subject. That is how I use them, I get the basic facts from the mainstream and then check to see what the commentary is and to find deeper sources of news through blogs. I'll find this Yahoo news/blogs feature very handy.

I think it will make the news more interesting, and help blogs. However since the first thing Chris did was put up a form to isolate blogs, and the first thing I did was try to figure out the URL, you think they might get the hint people want blogs in isolation?

I've got feeds set up for Technorati, IceRocket and Yahoo, all alerting me to blog posts related to two keywords. What I'm finding so far (I only set it up today) is that Yahoo is giving me updates far more often, but the new posts they're pointing me to aren't what I'm looking for.

It looks like the difference is that at IceRocket and Technorati I'm searching for posts with the keyword in the tag, whereas Yahoo is only looking for the word in the text.